Grammar Fundamentals
Do letters, proposals and e-mail messages leave your office with glaring grammar errors? Does your staff need help remembering when to use a comma, colon, and semi-colon?
This workshop is designed for anyone who needs to write e-mail messages, letters, and business documents that communicate clearly and convey a professional image of the writer and the organization.
In this two-day course, participants review the key grammar and punctuation rules necessary for effective business writing. Through examples and practice exercises, they learn to identify and correct errors and awkward constructions in their own writing.
Our Approach:
- To ensure that our training meets the participants’ needs, we customize the curriculum after assessing writing samples and reviewing objectives.
- During training, we encourage active participation through discussion and practice.
- Participants apply concepts and techniques by evaluating, editing, planning and drafting job-related documents with one-to-one feedback from the instructor.
Depending on the needs of your group, participants will learn:
- The importance of correct grammar, punctuation, and word usage to clear communication.
- The ways in which usage affects the credibility of both the writer and the organization.
- A review of the terms used to discuss grammar and punctuation (e.g., the parts of speech and the parts of a sentence).
- How to identify and correct incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, and clumsy, awkward sentences.
- How to identify and correct common pronoun errors: using the correct form of a pronoun, making sure that pronouns clearly refer to specific nouns and agree with the noun in number, and avoiding inappropriate gender-related pronouns.
- How to identify and correct common errors with verb usage: forming the singular and plural forms of the verb, and using the correct tense for regular and irregular verbs.
- How to identify and correct common problems with the use of articles: whether to use “a†or “an,†and how to determine when an article is or is not needed.
- How to identify and correct the most frequent comma errors.
- How to identify when and how to use apostrophes, semicolons, colons, parentheses, and dashes.
- How to identify and clarify commonly misused words.
- Strategies for learning more about the use of grammar and punctuation.
